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[Woodstock Report, December 1998, No. 56]
Copyright © 1998 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
In November the Woodstock Theological Center sponsored a forum entitled "St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises: Woodstock’s Way of Promoting Justice" to celebrate two anniversaries: the 450th anniversary of the publication of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola and the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Woodstock Theological Center. Father James L. Connor, S.J., director of the Woodstock Center, moderated the discussion. The three panelists are all senior fellows of the Woodstock Center: J. Michael Stebbins, Dolores R. Leckey, and Gasper F. Lo Biondo, S.J. We present an edited and abridged version of the forum.
INTRODUCTION
James L. Connor, S.J., has served as director of the Woodstock Theological Center since 1987. Prior to joining Woodstock he was pastor of Holy Trinity Parish in Washington, D.C., and served as president of the National Jesuit Conference and provincial of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus.
When I was assigned to be the director of the Woodstock Center eleven years ago, my first question was, "What is theological reflection?" I had heard of theological centers that do academic theology and I had heard of social centers that do social research and social action. But what in the world, I asked myself, is this strange animal that does theological reflection on social issues?
In the midst of my confusion, there was one thing I was sure of. As a center founded by the Society of Jesus, Woodstock, like all Jesuit works, had to have something to do with the spirituality, the pedagogy, and the methodology of St. Ignatius, as he describes it in his little book entitled the Spiritual Exercises. Therefore, I said to myself, theological reflection must be some form of the Ignatian process of discernment and decision making on social issues like race and poverty, a safe and sustainable environment, distribution of wealth and social welfare, peacemaking and national security.
I was confirmed in this hunch when I came upon a description of the Ignatian method in a 1975 mission statement of the Society of Jesus:
The pedagogy of the Spiritual Exercises is the pedagogy of discernment. It teaches people to discover for themselves where God is calling them, what God wants them to do, as they are and where they are . . . . The general method to be followed is to produce this awareness and to engage in this discernment as a constant interplay between experience, reflection, decision, and action, in line with the Jesuit ideal of being contemplative in action.
On pages 9 and 10 in this Report, there are brief descriptions of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and one of the key exercises, namely, the Examen of Consciousness.
What we’re going to do here is illustrate this method as we use it at Woodstock. Each of the speakers will describe a program for which he or she is responsible. Then each will describe a particular feature of the Spiritual Exercises. Finally, they will show how that particular feature is operative in the program they direct. So it will be a descrip-tion of the program, a feature of the Exercises, and an illustration from the program of how that feature operates. This format is admittedly a bit contrived and artificial, but we hope it will be concrete and provide some variety.
ARRUPE PROGRAM IN SOCIAL ETHICS FOR BUSINESS
Dr. J. Michael Stebbins is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center and director of the Arrupe Program in Social Ethics for Business. He is the author of The Divine Initiative: Grace, World-Order, and Human Freedom in the Early Writings of Bernard Lonergan.
I run the Arrupe Program in Social Ethics for Business at Woodstock. The goal of the program is to help executives and managers develop a practical approach to exercising ethical and effective leadership in their organizations. We don’t aim primarily to provide people with a collection of information about business ethics or a set of rules to follow. We aim rather at something more fundamental, namely, to help people recognize and develop their own in-built and God-given human capacity to make and carry out good ethical decisions.
"Faith and Values at Work" is one of the specific projects of the Arrupe Program. It is an eight-week seminar for executives and managers who are religiously committed and are looking to discover the relevance of their religious faith to their daily practice of business. The weekly two-hour sessions usually include prayer, brief reflection on scripture, presentations, exercises, and a good deal of guided discussion. In between sessions the participants do readings and respond in writing to a set of reflection questions. As the seminar comes to an end, participants are asked to sum-marize what they have learned and to identify specific changes they have decided to make in the way they live and, especially, in the way they operate at work.
The presentations (and the exercises and discussions that follow) deal either with the way we humans are "built" to operate or the way business usually operates. The first category treats, for instance, where our motivation comes from and how we use it, or how we’ve been conditioned by our culture(s) and whether we recognize that influence, or the steps involved in a responsible decision-making process. In the second category, there are business issues like downsizing, levels of compensation, price-setting, human resources and personnel policies, and conflicts of interest.
The Spiritual Exercises help participants integrate their religious faith into their business practice in at least two ways. They give business people a perspective from which to view their work, and a practical decision-making method called discernment.
First, the perspective. A meditation called "The First Principle and Foundation" consists of a few lines of text at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. We include it in the very first unit of "Faith and Values at Work." I’ll quote it, and ask that you be patient with Ignatius’ chauvinistic language.
Man [i.e., all of us, the human family in its entirety] is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.
The other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created. Hence, man is to make use of them in as far as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them in as far as they prove a hindrance to him.
Therefore, we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, as far as we are allowed free choice and are not under any prohibition. [The next sentence clarifies what Ignatius means by being "indifferent."] Consequently, as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life. The same holds for all other things. Our one desire and choice should be what is most conducive to the end for which we are created.
This might be considered Ignatius’ version of the human family’s "mission statement." It tells us who we are, what we are about, and what criterion we should use in making important choices about how we are going to live. So the First Principle and Foundation enables the "Faith and Values at Work" participants to see their work within a comprehensive Christian worldview. Instead of starting with faith and business in separate compartments and then puzzling over how to bring them together, the seminar participants are invited to view the world from God’s perspective and then to ask from that perspective, "What is business for?" It also places the issue of business ethics in a whole new light. It is not simply an ethics of law, which asks, "How do I keep my business out of trouble and my executive team out of jail?," but an ethics of achievement, which asks, "How can we increase our business’s ability to contribute to a truly just and humane standard of living for our employees and for all those we serve?"
Participants uniformly find this integrating perspective helpful. It helps close the gap between faith, family, and business life. In so doing, it points the way to closing the gap between personal values and corporate values (if and when disparity exists). It also enables participants to spot the fallacy in any claim that business is the "real" world and that economic goals, rules, and procedures are the ultimate values in life. For Ignatius, obviously, business success is in service and subservient to the end for which we are created, and we pray to be free to choose what is most conducive to that end.
A second feature of the Exercises shows us how to choose well. It is the Examen of Consciousness, a practice of discernment of spirits (see page 10). It involves taking about 15 minutes, usually in the evening, to put yourself thankfully in God’s presence and to review what happened during the day. In particular, you pay attention to the feelings that the day’s events stirred up. Why? Because for Ignatius, finding patterns over time in the feelings that surface in this prayerful context is the key to discerning God’s call or guidance in your life. The pushes and pulls of your feelings reflect a tug of war going on in your spirit. God calls each of us through our most authentic desires, that is, the desires that are most in harmony with our own best selves. The Examen helps you get clear about what your desires really are and how you have been acting on them. It helps you answer the question, "To what extent am I being motivated by the Holy Spirit and to what extent am I being motivated by something else?" A subset of questions are: "To what kinds of people, activities, situations, or objects do I find myself being drawn? Which desires lead me toward the service of other people, and which tend to close me in on myself? What do I find myself desiring most of all?" The purpose of this kind of prayer is to become better attuned to God’s guiding presence as it manifests itself in the concrete events of our lives. Executives become increasingly proficient at noticing the ways in which God is already present in the workplace, laboring to bring about the Kingdom; and they gain the ability to discern how God is asking them in quite specific ways to cooperate with him there, at work, as his disciples and friends.
Let me conclude. The First Principle and Foundation helps people see the big picture; it helps them see the world as it really is. The Examen helps people discern what God is asking them to do in that world. What could possibly be more practical, more realistic, and more useful to our common project of human living? I hope my remarks have given at least a hint of the socially transformative power of Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. Thank you.
CHURCH LEADERSHIP PROGRAM
Dolores R. Leckey is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, where she directs Woodstock’s Church Leadership Program. Prior to joining Woodstock last summer, Dolores was the executive director of the Secretariat for Family, Laity, Women and Youth at the National Council of Catholic Bishops. Among the books she has authored are Winter Music: A Life of Jessica Powers, Poet, Nun, Woman of the Twentieth Century and Seven Essentials for the Spiritual Journey.
Our fifth week-long retreat/workshop of the Church Leadership Program will take place next January (1999). The 25 participants constitute a new profile of contemporary church leadership: two bishops, ten priests, one sister, one deacon, one brother, six laymen, four laywomen. Among the priests, two, who are now pastors, had been editors of large diocesan papers; another priest is a diocesan chancellor; two priests are blood brothers. Among the laity, there is a married couple who together direct a diocesan family life office; other lay participants head national or diocesan offices; one is a historian and biographer in a secular college; one teaches theology in a Catholic university.
This Church Leadership Program is really about the spirituality of leadership. It grew out of Father Connor’s and Monsignor Liddy’s conviction that, given the times in which we live, a period marked by huge transitions and rapid change which are having a profound impact on human life, especially among the poor of the earth, a renewal of church leadership is essential. The program envisions church leaders who can respond creatively to the challenges of transition and change so that the church may have a vibrant mission to the world. I underline that: the vision is not about rearranging the church furniture ad intra but looks ad extra to engaging the church in the world, the world as described in Gaudium et Spes: "The world [which the Council has in mind] is the whole human family seen in the context of everything which envelops it: it is the world as the theater of human history, bearing the marks of its triumphs and failures, the world which, in the Christian vision, has been created and sustained by the love of its maker."(GS#2)
At Woodstock we recognize that the world—and therefore the horizon of the church leader—is marked by both triumph and failure (in the words of Gaudium et Spes), by progress and decline (in the language of Bernard Lonergan). However, while recognizing and processing that reality, we recall that the love of the Creator and the fact of redemption are every bit as real as the decline and failure. That truth generates hope in church leaders whatever setting they come from: parish, diocesan chancery, social service agency, educational institution.
At the heart of the Church Leadership Program is the Ignatian dynamic of discerning how and where God is calling the church in this moment of history. Both personal discernment and communal discernment are emphasized. How do we do this?
On the first day, after focusing on the experience of one’s own life and work/ministry, and after spotlighting the importance of culture on our ways of being leaders, we move into one of the classic Ignatian exercises, namely, a meditation on the Trinity. In it one imagines the Trinitarian God gazing down upon the vast sweep of the earth. The question posed is: What does God see? God sees "the peoples of the earth in all their diversity, some weeping, some laughing, some healthy, others sick, some being born, others dying" (Exercises). Participants are asked not only to look but to listen, to listen to how the people communicate and also to the decision of the Trinity: "Let us work out redemption of the human race."
This is an exercise of "passing over" into another’s experience. "Passing over" can be, and often is, a major step in understanding another person or a perplexing problem. It is a device sometimes used by poets, very advantageously, to create a new perspective and new depth. One who does so brilliantly is the Polish Nobelist Symborska who in one poem writes about death from the viewpoint of the cat left behind:
Footsteps on the staircase
But they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed too.Something doesn’t start
At its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
As it should.
Someone was always, always here,
Then suddenly disappeared
And stubbornly stays disappeared.
To apply this device to God, the Trinity, is at least awe-inspiring, and perhaps audacious. It is a key experience, this prayerful "passing over" of the retreatant into the mind, the heart, the viewpoint, and the vision of God. It opens the way to good decision making, which is what we hope for leaders.
Central to this meditation is the mystery of the Annunciation–the action that flows from the divine decision to "work out redemption." God’s announcement to a young Jewish woman, immersed in her religious and cultural situation, turns her world upside down. Entering into the Annunciation, as the Ignatian meditation leads us, we come in contact with the smaller but no less real annunciations in our own lives. The critic George Steiner in Real Presences describes such annunciations as a terrible beauty or gravity breaking into the small house of our cautionary being. Note cautionary. By and large we humans tend to be cautionary. But Steiner says, "If we have heard rightly the wing-beat and provocation of the visit, the house is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before." Intrusions of the Holy Spirit do not simply rearrange our domestic spheres; they bring previously unimagined worlds into the "houses" of our lives. As Kathleen Norris writes in her new book Amazing Grace, the Incarnation (which is what this meditation on Trinity and Annunciation is really all about) becomes the place where fear contends with hope. The Spiritual Exercises lead us to the point where hope prevails.
I have seen that with my own eyes.
A priest who participated in one of our programs last May wrote the following about what he perceives as a crisis in leadership:
Personally I am more and more convinced that priests, religious, and laity need to take a more assertive role in the general leadership and direction of the church. Generally we are content (and of course often challenged) with our "part of the vineyard" and do not attempt to move into the situation of the larger church. It is becoming apparent . . . that the mainline members of the church, laity and clergy together, have ceded the field to hostile and obstructionist movements and persons who represent a minority of Catholics but who are having an increasingly great influence on a signi-ficant number of others who are looking for leadership and finding none in the expected or usual places. All of a sudden all of us are waking up to the fact that the laity and priests of the church are going to have to move out and start taking responsibility for the larger church. I don’t know that I know how to do this, but I am trying to take some small steps in this direction.
This priest is pastor of a large, quite conservative parish. He is a former seminary rector, and was director of a national office. His small steps are risky, but he realizes "the house is not habitable in the same way." This effort to view one’s place in the church from God’s perspective is a key point in the Church Leadership Program.
In conclusion, the Church Leadership Program tries to explore at the deepest level possible in a short period how decisions are made. The ever-present challenge to leaders is not to drift (which is often related to fear), but to act decisively (after discernment, of course).
Recently, the question was posed to me, "How does a leader lead?" In light of this Woodstock project, I can answer as follows: with attention and authenticity; with clarity about one’s belief system; with a balance of solitude and action; with continual conversion—and with the Spiritual Exercises close at hand, and close to heart.
GLOBAL ECONOMY AND CULTURES
Rev. Gasper F. Lo Biondo, S.J., is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center. He directs Woodstock’s newest initiative, "Global Economy and Cultures." He is the author of a study, "Microenterprise Development in El Salvador: Changing Values, Village Banking, and Informal Education."
This evening I want to illustrate how a key feature of the Spiritual Exercises is at the core of Woodstock's Global Economy and Cultures project.
The Global Economy and Cultures project is an effort to explore the impact of globalization on cultures and peoples, especially the poor. It is a three-year consultation among 41 Jesuit centers in 34 countries to ascertain the impact—good and bad—of globalization on local cultures.
By "globalization" we mean the process of increasing communication between and among peoples, marked by ever-intensifying cross-border movement of financial capital, information, people, goods and services, images, and ideas. The "carriers" of globalization are a variety of institutions, programs, and economic policies.
"Culture" means the way in which a group of people live, think, feel, organize themselves, celebrate, and share life. Participants in the project will ascertain the concrete ways cultures are being affected and shaped by globalization, and how they are responding. The task of this network is to develop, reach consensus on, and recommend a set of ethical guidelines for policymakers in both the public and private sectors. These ethical guidelines are intended to be used to enhance and increase the beneficial effects and diminish the harmful effects of globalization. That’s our goal.
We hope this consensus statement will be also be helpful for the staffs of social research centers and grassroots social action organizations, engaged in leadership training and local community development.
The study will move through four phases. Participating centers will begin with data gathering based on local experience. Secondly, they will share the data and make sense of it through study and analysis. In the third phase of the project, participants will make an evaluation to determine which impacts of the globalization process are positive and which are negative on cultures. Finally, during the last phase, network participants will forge guidelines and practical recommendations.
Guiding this process is the sense of mission and vision which these centers share. It enables them to talk frankly and communicate effectively with one another cross-culturally and internationally, even when they disagree. It is rooted in the Spiritual Exercises and in recent mission statements of the Jesuits worldwide, the most recent (1995) of which called Jesuits to address the impact of globalization on cultures:
In our times there is a growing consciousness of the interdependence of all peoples in one common heritage. The globalization of the world economy and society proceeds at a rapid pace, fed by developments in technology, communications, and business. While there can be many benefits from this phenomenon, it can also create injustices on a massive scale . . . . In justice, we must work to counter this by building up a world order of real solidarity, where all can have a rightful place at the banquet of the Kingdom. (Decree three, Number 7)
A key feature of the Spiritual Exercises that this Global Economy and Cultures project incorporates is its method, its built-in structure for making concrete decisions that promote justice in our world. Embedded in every exercise is a modus operandi, a way of proceeding, a way of organizing a series of successive steps. In this design St. Ignatius shares with us what he himself experienced during his months of retreat in the cave at Manresa. What Ignatius discovered was the basic human dynamism that arises out of our desire to know and be known, to love and be loved. As he became aware of how that dynamism unfolded during his retreat, Ignatius captured its basic elements and put them to work in each of his Spiritual Exercises.
Let's look at how he did this in one exercise, the contemplation on the birth of Christ. There are three preliminary steps. The first is to recall the story we are about to consider: in this exercise it will be that Mary, in the third term of her pregnancy, sets out from Nazareth for Bethlehem, riding on a donkey, accompanied by Joseph. Secondly, Ignatius insists that I use my imagination to see the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem, and the place of Jesus’ birth, with all its sights, sounds, and smells. In the third preliminary step Ignatius suggests that "I ask for the ‘grace’ (the favor) that I desire." In this exercise I ask for an intimate knowledge of Jesus, who was born for me, so that I may love him more completely and follow him more closely.
After these preliminary steps, Ignatius goes on to suggest that we then use our imagination to contemplate each person in the story, who each one is and how each of them looks, what she or he is saying to the others, and what each is doing. Ignatius goes further. He suggests that we imagine ourselves present with Mary, Joseph, and the infant. He even goes on to suggest that we imagine ourselves as participants, not just observers, that we enter the story, perhaps helping someone in some way.
Once we have engaged ourselves personally, Ignatius has us build on this experience. He tells us to think about the experience, and search for what it means. He asks us to reflect on that experience, make judgments about its implications for our own lives, and draw conclusions.
Finally, Ignatius has us round out our contemplation of the birth of Christ with a heart-to-heart conversation—what he calls a colloquy. He moves us toward this kind of closure by suggesting that we think of what we would say to the Trinity, to Christ, or, perhaps, to Mary. In effect, Ignatius is gently guiding us to respond wholeheartedly to the inner light we may have received during the course of the contemplation. He wants us to decide to live by the values that we have discovered.
This contemplation on the birth of Christ is but one example of this key feature of the Spiritual Exercises. There are four basic elements to this feature. Ignatius designed each exercise to activate four capacities or powers that good decisions proceed from and build upon: first, our capacity to experience, to pay attention to data that is relevant to what we are about; secondly, our capacity to understand, and to interpret the meaning of what we experience; thirdly, our capacity to verify this understanding by referring it to the data, reflecting, and making a judgment; and fourth, our capacity to respond to situations, that is, to discern and decide the most worthwhile course of action and to carry out the decision.
The pattern of these four elements holds true not only for each exercise, but also for the "flow" of the Spiritual Exercises as a whole. Recent international planning meetings of the Jesuit order have described this marvelous Ignatian insight:
For a Jesuit, . . . not just any response to the needs of men and women of today will do. The initiative must come from the Lord laboring in events and people here and now. God invites us to join with him in his labors, on his terms, and in his way. To discover and join the Lord, laboring to bring everything to its fullness, is central to the Jesuit way of proceeding. It is the Ignatian method of prayerful discernment, which can be described as "a constant interplay between experience, reflection, decision, and action, in line with the Jesuit ideal of being 'contemplative in action'." (GC 34, D. 26, N. 8)
Now back to the Global Economy and Cultures project. How does this key feature shape our project?
You may already have guessed that the four phases of the Global Economy and Cultures project are based on the dynamism that St. Ignatius captures in the Spiritual Exercises. Just as Ignatius builds every exercise on experience, often with imagination as a help to entering into the experience of others, so, too, the first phase of the project, data gathering, calls for careful attention to the experience of others, as well as that of oneself. Participants are asked, therefore, to ascertain from their own experience in the country in which they live what beneficial and harmful impacts globalization is indeed having on local cultures and peoples, especially the poor.
During the second phase (in late 1999), participants will think about the data that everyone has gathered from all over the globe. Rigorous data analysis and interpretation will allow participants to better understand and explain why and how globalization is producing these effects. Then, just as Ignatius suggests, the task of the third phase of the project (2000) is to verify this explanation or these explanations by double-checking them against the data, reflecting on the data to identify and affirm the social advantages and disadvantages of the impacts they have discovered.
During the fourth and final phase of the project (2001), participants will make value judgments and decisions about recommendations to be offered to policymakers in order to promote the good in globalization and eliminate its harmful effects on local cultures. In this phase the centers will weigh values, exercise discernment, and resolve any differences they may have. Their conversation will be a form of the Ignatian "concluding colloquy."
This Ignatian way of proceeding is Woodstock's way of promoting justice.